This collection of articles is the
second volume of a three volume series coming out of the
Commonwealth Fund Conference held in 1998. Divided into two
sections, the 11 articles seek to discover and interrogate
Hollywood’s historical and contemporary audiences. The first section
presents a chronological account of movie going, where as the second
section presents more particular, ethnographic research of identity
construction and spectatorship that fully compliments the
theoretical standpoint of the earlier articles.

Hollywood has historically claimed that
it was ignorant of its market, and that its audience was highly
unpredictable. This is seen here as a tactic that attempts to hide
the “brute determination” (ref) of its rationalised industrial
structure behind a veil of glamorous self-mythologisation. Indeed,
in positioning its audience as unpredictable, Hollywood legitimised
its generic production as a response that accommodated this
instability. In repositioning the audience as an integral part of
the rationale behind genre based production, this collection calls
for genre criticism to move away from works that concentrate on
film-as-text, and to shift its emphasis to the often complex
interactions between film going audiences and the texts themselves.
In doing so, all these essays are exemplary – and the collection
taken as a whole begins to map the way Hollywood’s own discourse of
its audiences has affected its historical production of genre.

In terms of Hollywood’s own conception
of its audience, Richard Maltby suggests that this idea of ignorance
has persisted because Historians have traditionally looked to the
records of production, rather than “in the history of exhibition and
in the almost entirely unwritten history of distribution.” (23) His
article convincingly argues that from the 1920s to the mid 1940s the
industry’s understanding of its audience was based on its conception
of exhibition – different films in different theatres attended by
different types of “community and class patronage” that classified
the audience in particular ways. Melvyn Stokes’ article is concerned
with these classifications in terms of gender, and examines the
importance of the female spectator in the 1920s and 1930s, and the
effect of this on the development of the star system, fan cultures,
and the eventual emergence of the “women’s film” as a distinct
genre. Like many articles in this collection, Stokes re-examines
historical data, and here uses “movie autobiographies” (ref) that
were taken as part of the famous Payne Fund Studies. Similarly,
Susan Ohmer examines Gallup’s methods of audience research, arguing
this constructed a discourse that ultimately attempted to control
audience reactions, and served marketing, rather than consumer
interests.

Indeed, the way in which Hollywood has
imagined its audience is vital to the understanding of its
production decisions – a key theme in this collection. In the
articles by Sklar and Kramer, Hollywood’s imagined audience of
‘modern women’ had shifted by the 1960s, and was replaced by a 19
year old male as the target audience, whose imagined influence still
dominates the production of male-oriented blockbusters today.
Alongside this imagined male audience, Allen then investigates what
he calls the rise of “postmodern family entertainment” since the
late 1980s. He charts the production of the family film at this
time, emphasising the way in which these productions are no longer
self-contained texts, but revolve around product tie-ins and
merchandising. The phenomenon of synergies and licensed tie-ins has
become so prominent a feature of production today that Allen
convincingly proclaims Hollywood film making as we have previously
understood it, is dead.

Part two of this collection is concerned
less with the re-examination of Hollywood’s discourse on its
audience, and instead concentrates on listening to audiences
themselves. Firstly, Kuhn’s beautifully written article on what she
calls “enduring fandom” uses oral histories of cinema going in
Britain in the 1930s, and asserts the social nature of film going in
these accounts, providing a more complex and nuanced understanding
of how media texts and their audiences interact. Austin goes on to
explore a group that is under-studied in this area, and challenges
the assumptions of a simplistic, paternalistic and heterosexual
“male gaze” in his examination of responses to the film Basic
Instinct (1992). By looking at the interaction of spectatorship
with expectations produced by film promotion, Austin reveals the
complex way in which young straight men negotiate their identities
often outside of critical assumptions of voyeuristic and sadistic
pleasures. Barker and Brooks’ article shares a similar concern to
re-negotiate the idea of a homogenous male gaze by research into
spectatorship of the film Judge Dredd (1995). The final two
articles deal with spectatorship of violence and horror; Hill’s
article examines the way in which the experience of screen violence
can be theorised outside of the problematic media effects tradition,
and in the final piece, Berry examines female spectatorship of the
horror genre, that largely takes place in private.

This collection makes a serious contribution to
audience studies, however its strength lies in the equal
contribution it makes to our understanding of the intersection
between genre and audience. This book makes a valuable addition to
any collection, and is suitable for those with an interest not only
in audience studies (where its theoretical concerns may be seen as
‘preaching to the converted’), but will appeal equally to those with
an interest in genre, ethnography, and Hollywood as a cultural
industry.